"Every Negro poet has 'something to say,' " wrote Gwendolyn Brooks in
1950, hanging out a precarious shingle for all her Negro colleagues.
"Simply because he is a Negro, he cannot escape having some important
things to say." This same claim is invoked in the foreword to this
collection of 37 new Negro poets, but what the book proves is happily
quite the opposite: it is because they are poets, not Negroes, that
they have something to say.